Censoring Sensors

Following the wave of U.K. terror attacks in the spring of 2017, prime minister Theresa May called on technology companies like Facebook and YouTube to create better tools for screening out controversial content--especially digital video--that directly promotes terrorism. Meanwhile, in the U.S., major advertisers including AT&T, Verizon, and WalMart have pulled ad campaigns from YouTube after discovering their content had been appearing in proximity to videos espousing terrorism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate speech. In response to these controversies, Google expanded its advertising rules to take a more aggressive stance against hate speech, and released a suite of tools allowing advertisers to block their ads from appearing on certain sites. The company also deployed new teams of human monitors to review videos for objectionable content. In a similar vein, Facebook announced that it would add 3,000 new employees to screen videos for inappropriate content.